Elvis is back and he’s heading for Moscow

“Le Chat” (the cat) is a Belgian institution who has been offering his social observations and critique of the human condition daily in the main Brussels newspaper Le Soir since 1983. It was therefore only natural that he be entered into the Eurovision Song Contest 2009 for Belgium - with one difficulty.

Le Chat appears in a comic strip – with grey fur, pointed ears, a large nose and generally indiscernible mouth; he wears clothing like a human and has not particularly cat-like habits such as driving a car and visiting a bistro.

The popularity of the comic strip by artist Philippe Geluck is based on Le Chat’s humour which mixes Belgian surrealism with clever wordplay. Sayings of Le Chat include:

La mort c'est un peu comme la connerie. Le mort il ne sait pas qu'il est mort, ce sont les autres qui sont tristes. Pour le con c'est pareil…
(Death is a bit like stupidity. The dead person doesn’t know he is dead, it’s everyone else who is sad. And the same applies to stupid people…)

On prétend que l'être humain n'emploierait son cerveau qu'à 50% de ses capacités. Personnellement, je n'y crois qu'à moitié.
(They say that humans only use 50% of capacity of their brain. Personally I only believe the half of it).

The difficulties of taking a comic-strip character without physical form who has never spoken a word let alone sung a complete song, and entering him into the world’s largest song contest are not to be underestimated. Belgian Television needed some help from on high, which they received from the King, Elvis Presley, or rather from Elvis impersonator Patrick Ouchène, and “Copycat” his tribute song to Le Chat.

The song is a great rockabilly number bringing the mood and style of 50s music to a modern-day audience. watch Belgian TV has ambitious plans to make Le Chat appear on stage during the live Eurovision broadcast, and we will see how successful they have been in May.

Some of the lyrics to the song proved too controversial to Elvis Presley fan clubs in Belgium and Holland, including:

He’s a copycat, trying to steal my soul,
but he’s too fat to rock ‘n’ roll
…
He’s too dead
To rock ‘n’ roll,

The fan clubs lodged official complaints with the organizers of the competition, claiming the lyrics of the song were disrespectful to the memory of their idol. A former songwriter for Elvis Presley, 71-year old Michael Jarret, even went as far as offering to write new lyrics for Patrick’s song.

Read the full lyrics here

Unlike Georgia, Belgium was not excluded from the competition, but the legions of Elvis fans across Europe may affect Belgium’s place in the Eurovision voting.